frowsty

adj

1. (British, dialectal)Of an atmosphere: not fresh; close, musty, stuffy; of an object: having a musty, stale odour.

   “He thought of getting back by half-past twelve, / And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep / In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes / Of coke, and full of snoring, weary men.”

   “[T]he London theatres themselves, nearly all of them, the meanest, dirtiest, dingiest, fustiest, frowstiest edifices in the country.”

   “[W]hy are single rooms so much worse than double ones? Fewer, further, frowstier? Damper, darker, dingier? Noisier, narrower, nastier?”

   “Perhaps the very best people were in Paris, but there was enough going on in Brussels to replicate that older, frowstier form of society that was to Morgan's taste.”

2. (British, dialectal)Of a person: dull, slow; also, unkempt, untidy.

   “A window opened above the shop, and a frowsty-looking man, yellow-pale, was quickly and nervously hauling in the national flag. There were shouts of derision and mockery—a great overtone of acrid derision—the flag and its owner ignominiously disappeared.”

   “Man, he says, was still "frowsty-minded" and "half asleep" in the early twenty-first century, still in urgent danger of a relapse into the confused nightmare living of the Age of Frustration.”

   “So Mrs. Beaver and the children came bundling out of the cave, all blinking in the daylight, and with earth all over them, and looking very frowsty and unbrushed and uncombed and with the sleep in their eyes.”